State Police, Chief Prosecutor's Office Forging New Coalition

State To Fight Crime With Cooperation

December 23, 1991|By EDMUND MAHONY; Courant Staff Writer

Connecticut's state police department and chief prosecutor's office hope to gear up the prosecution of sophisticated kinds of crime with a new plan to pool their resources -- including personnel -- and re-emphasize the use of crime-fighting tools such as investigative grand juries and racketeering laws.

The new effort at cooperation between the state's pre-eminent police and prosecutorial organizations is similar, in some regards, to arrangements in the 1970s, when the state police department's organized-crime task force and the chief state's attorney's office were created by the General Assembly.

However, the working relationship between police and prosecutors withered during the 1980s as the result of a bitter personality dispute between former heads of the agencies and because of lack of interest by others.

The new program will take effect in January and is the result of planning by three relatively new Weicker administration appointees to the state criminal justice system: Chief State's Attorney Richard N. Palmer, Public Safety Commissioner Nicholas Cioffi and Col. Ray Ouellette, commander of the state police division in Cioffi's office.

Initially, the state police and chief state's attorney's office will exchange investigators, who will in effect act as liaisons for their departments. An inspector from the prosecutor's office will be assigned to the state police organized-crime task force and a state police detective will work on a squad from the chief state's attorney's office devoted to economic, or white-collar, crime.

In addition, grant money obtained by the state police department will be used to hire an investigative accountant. The accountant will report to the chief state's attorney's office in Wallingford, but will work for the state police narcotics and organized-crime task forces as well.

Palmer and Ouellette said they expect a variety of benefits from closer cooperation between their departments. Among other things, they said a freer exchange of information will result in more-effective investigations and a closer working relationship will result in better-constructed cases with a higher conviction

rate.

"This will allow us to know what's going on in both offices and to share information," Ouellette said. "We will be going in the same direction. It broadens our horizons and our scope."

Concurrent with the cooperation, the police and prosecutors plan to place a new emphasis on sophisticated prosecutions, reviving Connecticut's investigative one-man grand jury and using relatively ignored state racketeering laws, the Corrupt Organization and Racketeering Act [CORA].

The act permits investigators and prosecutors to target higher-echelon figures in wide-ranging criminal enterprises. It carries severe penalties, including a provision permitting the state to seize money, real estate and other property derived from criminal activity.

But the statute has been infrequently used outside narcotics prosecutions and law enforcement officials suspect it may take time before police and prosecutors learn to use it effectively.

The one-man grand jury was used widely by former Chief State's Attorney Austin J. McGuigan as a means to compeltestimony by witnesses in public corruption cases. He uncovered a job-selling scandal in New Britain, convicted two state commissioners and investigated political fund-raising. But his successor, John Kelly, chose not to use the grand jury as extensively and it has been ignored in recent years.

"I think there is going to be a learning curve and I think it is going to take a little while to get geared up," said Palmer, until recently a deputy U.S. Attorney. "We haven't done grand juries for several years and we haven't focused on the CORA statute.

"I think we have an obligation to try to attack the more-sophisticated organized criminal activity that really corrupts the system. For the last several years, we've really deferred to the federal authorities. And the federal authorities don't have the resources or the manpower to investigate all the areas that need to be investigated in Connecticut."

Ouellette said he viewed the statute, especially its provisions permitting the forfeiture of real estate, as a particularly effective means of punishing the directors of sophisticated criminal activity, people who are usually insulated from prosecution by layers of lower level employees.

"We can rip off the lower level all we want," Ouellette said. "But once we start targeting -- whether it be organized crime, economic crime or narcotics -- those that profit, those are the ones that we also ought to be targeting. We have to move from the bottom, but also damage it at the top where they feel they are sheltered and protected."